How do you anonymously pay for things when the ledger is public?

You do know that you can pay for mullvad in cash?

You can send cash in an envelope to them with your mullvad ID and they will credit your account.

fyi monero hasn't had the best trackrecord on the cryptography front[1]

I am not certain if they have improved or not but I believe zcash tends to do a lot better on that front

True... But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP

Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp

and most use cases around things like "smart contracts" end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/

I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding

Why do you think LLMs are so popular?

This is a good comment that makes all good points. But I just wanna say let's stop saying "blockchain" singular and with no preceding article like we're tech CEOs and it's some immutable god. They're blockchains, plural, like any other data structure there can be more than one and there are. eg The blockchain of ethereum is distinct from the blockchain for bitcoin but they are both blockchains.

Llms are made by genuinely smart mathematicians and computer scientists. Techbros are just the ones hyping them .

I have always been fascinated honestly by how reductive public discourse often becomes the larger its activity is. And it honestly is rather simple to explain: If an opinion becomes popular, it has no link with its veracity or validity, all it has to do with is how it appeals to common sense and how easy it is to swallow because for it to be popular, it needs to be approachable by all types of humans no matter their social, economical and personal backgrounds.

It is just like how academic or legal documents often seem classist by the language they use to approach real and proven phenomenons, but the reason their vocabulary is not accessible is because it needs to be nuanced to allow proper human abstraction the reality around us. Whereas the popular vocabulary is common since it's very nature is to allow exchange with all people.

Adam Back, who potentially might be Satoshi himself, is the CEO of the company that advised against increasing block sizes. It was more profitable for him if the main chain is inefficient.

Here's a decent video on this conspiracy theory

So there's some malice involved here, but not sure if the malicious person was Satoshi himself or if Satoshi and Adam are different people.

What, why would you doubt such obvious claims such as "the blockchain [...] weights 60 000 tons"

I seriously would like to know WTF the poster meant by that

Proof of Stake and Proof of Work are two different ways of electing who should append the blockchain with new transactions.

Proof of Work: the one who can waste most energy fastest is most likely to be elected.

Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.

It’s a bit oversimplified, but that’s the general idea.

Yes, Ethereum has been using PoS successfully for over three years and they're not the only major blockchain to do so. PoS works great these days, still using PoW in 2026 is a deliberate choice.

IMO xmr kinda saved proof of work by optimising their algo for consumer grade CPUs.

CPU mining is much less econimcal than GPU because you can't fit as many CPUs on a single system. Plus server grade CPUs with lots of smol cores instead of a few big ones hurts it too.

Makes it hard for anyone other than nerds with am extra PC to make money mining, and most of those guys won't be purposely picking a geographic location with the cheapest/most environmentally harmful electricity source. (More nerds live off of nuclear/solar than datacenters full of miners do)